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Monday, December 26, 2011

Hello everyone, Pocket Boy's 2.2 update has just been released.
We are working a bit silently on this title, but we keep monitoring all the feedback we can get and try to make improvements for our users. Before the iTunes Connect service and the Apple Store went on vacation, we wanted to push a bit of extra work on it and improve the app even further before the holidays.

PocketBoy's postcards arrived! There are two versions available: a buttons themed postcard and flowers themed one, on the back side we list our contacts info and our website's address. Do you like it?
You can find the postcards at "Tiramisù alle Fragole", aclothing store in Via Valperga Caluso n.7, Turin (Italy). Take a look on their website and on their facebook page too: they get new unique items each week and great season deals!

November is "Picture Book Month", an international initiative started by
Storyteller Dianne de Las Casas to celebrate Literature through picture
books. Picture books help children approach the world around them
through a mix of Art and Literature that speaks about universal truths.
This initiative mainly focuses on printed books, not to forget about
this form of expression in a world of digital e-books. Several blogs,
like PictureBookMonth, will dedicate the entire month to this purpose by
presenting a new Picture Book every day.
We at AddictiveColors, even though our "PocketBoy" is an interactive
book for iPad and iPhone, feel compelled to help celebrate the notion of
Children Literature (and not only that) expressing itself with images.
It's important to introduce books and reading to children as early as
possible, with physical books or through an e-Reader, and let them enjoy
the experience of exploration and learning they can provide when they
stimulate the child's interest and curiosity.
We love real books, but we also love sustainable and
environment-friendly models for their production. This is why we are
dedicating ourselves to the production of Pop-up books using recycled
paper and waste paper: we have included a few pictures in this blog post
to give you a work in progress look at them.
You can find more of them here

A warm welcome to version 2.1 of Pocket Boy!
In the newest Pocket Boy update you will find many exciting new features like the new navigation menu system: we focused on creating more space for the player to interact with and to avoid some confusion in some scenes in which the old menu could create some problems. You are presented with a little arrow, indicating you how to bring out the full sized menu, and by clicking on it the arrow will disappear slowly and the full sized menu rises up from the bottom of the screen.
We also added a new black pen and modified the existing colors for you to paint with and we added an eraser to help you create better and better drawings! Touching the envelope shaped icon in that very page, you will be able to share your drawings by e-mail or Facebook. What do you think about that?
Pocket Boy keeps travelling the world and learn new languages too: this time he brought back a brand new Korean version thanks to our friends that helped with the localization!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Ok, I'll be the first to say that scripting and command line operations are not the first thing that I learned to like on computers, but a lot of times they really can save a lot of time or... destroy files at random on a disk (rsync with a few not too correct paths and parameters here and there) ;).

As GUI only tools cannot always do the best job possible on their own or do not have certain capabilities by default, scripting in the command line can have its fair share of drawbacks... most of the time, an efficient workflow will consist of making it possible to quickly open a GUI file explorer from the command line and open a command line terminal from a specified folder in the GUI file explorer.
Sometimes, what I really want to do with scripting on a MacOS X system is to extend the Finder, making a small Finder Service that allows me to quickly do operations on files and folders as if the Finder could natively do it on its own. Call it create an normal PNG from an iPhone retina resource (say with a -hd suffix for those of you using Cocos2D) or a batch of them, call it generate a PVR texture using PowerVR's tools, call it delete all header files (.h) or all non-header files (*.c, *.cpp, *.m, *.mm, etc...) from a folder or a whole hierarchy of folders, etc... Sometimes Apple's Automator actions are enough on their own or it is simply easier to do it with Automator actions chained together, but sometimes what you really want to do is for Automator to let you link a folder, set of folders, or files to a shell script.
The problem with that strategy is the concept of working directory for the script and the target folder you would like that script to work inside of.

One way consists in getting from finder a set of files in one folder and its sub-folders and perform a batch action on them, say doing a simple scaling of a PNG using ImageMagick's tools, the script we can use inside Automator's Run Shell Script node (which would follow a Filter Finder Items node in which you can filter out the non .png files) could be:

A little bit of advice would be to alwas select the "pass input as arguments" option in the Run Shell Script node, for the above script to do what it is supposed to do. "$@" is a special keyword that basically includes a list of arguments to the current scripting node in Automator.
The following command

cd $(dirname "$f")

changes the working directory to the directory in which the provided file is located in.

In some cases that trick is enough, in others you just want to port your existing shell script so that it is able to run inside the folder you have selected in Finder in the simplest way possible (this is the meat of this post... or rather what motivated me to post this item tonight).

The Automator's Service workflow you are going to create is even simpler here:

1.) Service is configured to receive selected folders in Finder (top of the window).
2.) The Run Shell Script is configured to pass input as arguments.
3.) This is the code you write in the script src section (in this case I wanted to convert a bunch of .wav files into .mp3):

The magic here is the "$1" element which we save in a shell variable we export in the script so that other scripts launched in this step can use. "$1" is the currently selected folder in Finder.
This is the script in question (using the lame-encoder-related script-fu found here: http://www.discogs.com/groups/topic/151711):

(you can still see some debug echo commands there... Automator allows you to run the actions inside the app using a pre-defined input and see the output of all commands like the echo one... very useful :))

After this step in the above script

cd "$automatorInputFolder"

the script can execute with the correct working directory, the folder you have selected in the Finder.

Her clearand complete descriptionof the appis especially flattering because she stretched her website's rules a bit by giving us some space on a blog dealing "mainly" with mangas and animes, which Acalia isa meticulouscollector andexpert of.

Acalia's blog is called"Prevalentemente Anime e Manga"and here you canfind manyreviews on various comics series andcartoons, mostly from Japan,but also onsome extra material like Pocket Boy.

AddictiveColors is going to be at the View Conference 2011 here in Turin (Italy). It's very exciting to be able to join such an important venue for the digital arts!
Here the official site:www.viewconference.it
October 27th, 4:30PM is the time slot in which AddictiveColors will partecipare.

I showed "Pocket Boy" to my little cousins Martina and Florian 7 and 5 years old respectively. Just as I finished reading the first line of the book "Have you ever seen the Pocket Boy?" Florian's unespected:"Never!" made me smile.

Friday, September 2, 2011

So, the update to version 1.1 of Pocket Boy has just landed on the App Store, but what a week!
The story behind this update has its own fair share of small twists and turns, including rejecting our own update, before it got reviewed and a few days after submitting it. There was a problem with memory not being properly released when the app would transition from one page to another. We did not feel that giving it the chance to reach into people's hands was the right thing to do, so we pulled the binary before the review even took place and risked waiting more days as we lost our spot in the review queue. The problem has been fixed and we were able to add a few more improvements while cooking up the new update too :).

There are several areas that were touched upon in this update: some are clearly user visible changes and some other are under the hood changes which, in turn, have some consequences on the user experience, but are not limited to that (not all of them :)). As we already posted, the iPhone/iPod Touch (normal and retina) version are indeed coming!
Physics are now screen resolution independent, readjusting the points:meters ratio dynamically at runtime. This allows physics playing back at the same speed on all supported platforms.
The size of the app has been reduced to 29.6 MB, which is nice, but still 9.6 MB more than the limit for over the air downloads. So, WiFi and iTunes downloads only. We want this to become a Universal app and not release separate versions of the app, iPhone and iPad versions as separate packages), but this works against the 20 MB limit.
I now wanted take some time to touch upon the main user visible changes in this new version of Pocket Boy and offer an update on our ongoing performance boosting effort:

The app is now available in Spanish and the iTunes store front should now be localized in all supported languages too.

An index has been implemented as an horizontal scrolling menu with page thumbnails. Going back and forth in the book is now much easier. You can quickly activate it by double tapping on the main button icon on the bottom of each page. In the effort to create this new index, the whole menu system has been revamped and rewritten almost from scratch. Some physics cleanup and initializations issues have been uncovered thanks to the new index menu. With a new Physics management singleton object together with a change in the pages' transition system, we found an interesting way to fix those issues and cleanup resources without impacting the transition between pages.

There is a new graphical instructions overlay which can be quickly pulled up by pressing the new "gears" icon on the bottom right of each page. It will show up when you tap the main button icon.

New "credits" page with the new official AddictiveColors logo and a link to the official blog for you to browse directly from your device.

We are transitioning the art assets pipeline towards PVR textures. There are several options, each with its own set of pluses and minuses. Uncompressed PVR textures, 16 bits with alpha (RGBA4444) or not (RGB565), are great for single large resources such as backgrounds, but suffer from color banding artifacts with some of our art assets. They load very quickly although they eat a bit more disk space than PNG's. PVRTC, compressed, textures are not very suitable for the current art style, but zipped PVR textures (PVZ) could offer both load speed and storage space savings when used for resources such as texture atlases (sprite sheets). The 1.1 update already contains a lot of resources transitioned to PVR format and should feel snappier to use, but there is much more coming up. We are not done optimizing the memory footprint of our app yet :).

Here is one of the new features in the 1.1 version of "Pocket Boy": pop-up page instructions! To make using the app more intuitive we have tried to offer a graphical representation of the user experience, but we have not described what you should do it page by page in detail. As usual, we urge you to discover what is hidden in each illustration, have fun!

Thursday, July 21, 2011

We know there are curious young readers worldwide and for this reason Pocket Boy speaks English, Italian, French and German. We hope he will soon able to speakother languages and travel to many more countries. On the home page of the app you will find buttons that correspond to selectable languages, the tale will be automatically displayed in the language of the button you have pressed.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

“Pocket Boy” is an interactive tale for curious young readers who are eager to play with a book, identify themselves with this little clumsy boy, and interact with his little yet very rich world.
Every page is a tiny world for you to explore and change, an urge to create new shapes, draw and play around with everyday objects from a new perspective. There are no strict rules binding this adventure, the reader will experiment with the elements the story provides and figure out what to do page by page.